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Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7
CREATING INTERACTIVE FICTION WITH INFORM 7 is a jargon-free, step-by-step guide to mastering the basics of creating dynamic, text-based story worlds. Inform 7 is a free multiplatform interactive fiction authoring environment that uses an intuitive natural language syntax. A tool focused on writers, not programmers, Inform allows users construct complex, rich storytelling worlds by writing sentences as simple as "Tom is a person," or as complicated as "Instead of attacking Tom when something lethal is held, now every nearby watchdog owned by Tom hates the player." No prior programming experience is required. Throughout the book, readers develop a full-length, release-quality example game, exploring the real-world issues involved in authoring participatory narratives and gaining skills that can be applied to the creation of future games and stories.
(Publisher's copy)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 00:14
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Pieces
Pieces is a puzzle story. To read the work, you assemble the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, each piece yielding a portion of narrative. Under your hands, several lives take shape in earnest if sometimes wobbly and unprepossessing assemblages. The manner in which you put the pieces together affects the course of the characters’ lives, different configurations resulting in different outcomes.
(Source: Author's description at Wordcircuits)
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 15:41
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Pyxis Byzantium
Pyxis Byzantium is a hypermedia narrative investigation into the fall of Byzantium in 1453. Surrounded by enemy forces for decades, the final invasion of the city was widely anticipated by some of the populace, denied by others, and a focus of wonder and prayer. This piece imagines several different residents of the city, their fears and hopes, and their beliefs about the sources of destiny. The navigation includes maps of the city, sacred holidays, and the chronology of the destruction. Because of its extensive use of Flash, it is not currently playable in original form.
Artist's Statement:
Scott Rettberg - 09.01.2013 - 16:24
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Narrative Units
Narrative Units" is a networked visualization based on the gutenberg.org archive, information theory, and video.
Artist Statement
The Narrative Units project addresses a number of questions by interconnecting several systems of interest. Information Theory, which strictly concerns itself with the encoding and transmission of data, is displaced into the context of a literary narrative. This framing serves to evoke question surrounding the dispersion of Information Theory and other paradigms of first-wave cybernetics into contemporary culture.
The source text, narratives from Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/), are treated as a message source. In terms of the Narrative Units system, the text displayed in white is noise. The system matches a particular string of symbols which correspond to a set of definitions from an introductory text on Information Theory. Matching words are displayed in red, and placed in one of the lower panels of the visualization.
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 16:52
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Who is Flora?
I partially uncovered Flora's story through a well-worn stack of postcards at a dusty Midwestern estate sale in the summer of 1999. She had spent many months during the 1940s traveling alone across the United States and had consistently sent postcards back home to her mother in Peoria, Illinois. When I happened across her hand-written cards at the dissolution of her own estate, I was taken with the stories her cards revealed. I felt as though Flora and I had similar worldviews, and I easily felt a connection to her themes of freedom, loneliness, youth, death, memory and love. "Who Is Flora" is a dialog between Flora's travels and my interpretations. The story itself is presented on-line through a series of interactive screens. In addition to Flora's screens, my own screens share my reflections and thoughts, which are laid out visually to the right of Flora's stories. Graphic design, sound, motion, and text help further the sense of time and place to draw the reader more fully into the experience. Since this story is also a website it is constantly growing and changing; pieces are added as others are changed and deleted as the story grows.
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 19:17
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Trilogy
My work with visual narrative has included installation form, book works, diptychs and billboard presentations. Using the web has allowed me to continue to expand my preoccupations with constructing rules for reading, methods of pacing and continue to explore image/text relationships. I am interested in the space between language and image.
Trilogy is comprised of 3 image/text narratives whose themes are concerned with survival. Locale and characters are suggested by cropped fragments from mass media imagery as well as map fragments. While the images may allude to time period by photographic style or content, their function (protagonist, action, location) is directed by the text.
Trilogy is a collaboration with Los Angeles fiction writers Rod Moore and Katherine Haake, both of whom have allowed me to reconfigure their texts.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 13.01.2013 - 21:10
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Waxweb
"Wax..." was my first feature, executed from 1985-1991 with a variety of arts funding, and a co-production commissioning from ZDF in Germany. The narrative is grotesque, an unresolved and unresolvable tragedy revolving around the perceptual and ethical misperceptions of one Jacob Maker, flight simulation systems programmer, and amateur beekeeper. Half-way between suspense and suspension, the movie moves through space, as the protagonist is translated from his home in Alamogordo out to the Army's Deseret Test facility, and beyond, to caves or the world of the dead, and perhaps even further, if his endless talking voice is to be believed (it should be). Dislocated, disoriented, fragmented, and finally flying, the hero and all those bees and other pictures accompanying him fly backwards and forwards through time. And in a sense the viewer does too.
Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 01:39
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Experiments in Literary Cartography
Coover wrote: “The most distinctive literary contribution of the computer has been (...) the intimate layering and fusion of imagined spatiality and temporality.” Of course, by “spatiality” Coover meant the topologies of text non-linear in its presentation, not a more literal representation of space. I discuss my experiments using the Google Maps API as an interface for hypertext fiction. This of course is not in itself new, but there are some possibilities in cartography-oriented fiction I would like to call attention to. In particular:
1. Using a familiar interface, such works may introduce a broader audience to Electronic Fiction, without dumbing it down;
2. The Golden Age’s concerns with spatiality are recast now with a third extra dimension, represented space in a more literal sense. The realm of topological possibilities in this intertwining – temporality, textual structure, represented space – is vast. 3. Such works inevitably touch upon our subjective relationship with space, and the shifting modes of our articulation thereof. Three works are presented:
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:56
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Big Swing
Big Swing is a semi-non-linear, online narrative that mixes text, photography, sound design, video and interactivity. The story is designed to be explored rather than read. Delivered in semi-non-linear modules, the piece attempts to introduce and resolve tension in the manner of a traditional narrative, while still providing the user some degree of choice and control.
Exploring the story: Click on the small squares and words to reveal story fragments. Yellow words connect to the next chapter.
Scott Rettberg - 11.04.2013 - 12:18
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The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project
The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project experiments with microfiction, or flash fiction, a genre of literature that generally entails narratives of only 300-1000 words. Inspired by Richard Brautigan’s pithy “The Scarlatti Tilt”, a story of only 34 words published in 1971, my work involves 24 stories of 140 characters or less about life in an American city in the 21st C. delivered––or “tweeted”––on Twitter over a 24 hr. period.
The launch date was Friday, August 21, beginning 12 a.m. PST. Each hour until 11 p.m., I posted a story, and followers of my twitter site were encouraged to tweet their own. After followers tweeted their stories, I cut and pasted them to the Project Blog. An archive of all of the stories can be found there.
Scott Rettberg - 11.04.2013 - 12:39
