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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
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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
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A Network Analysis of Dissertations About Electronic Literature
More than 60 dissertations in the field of electronic literature have been documented in the ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, including tags, abstracts and in most cases links to full texts of the dissertations.
Stig Andreassen - 26.09.2013 - 12:54
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Tierra de Extracción: How Hypermedia Novels could enhance Literary Assessment
Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences suggests that there are at least eight different types of intelligence. Due to genetic variation and personal experiences, no two people have the same combination of intelligences. These do not only signal the way we interpret and cope with the world around us but the way we react to it. It is no coincidence that Reader Oriented Theories focus on the role of the reader in processing and interpreting text and not solely on textual perception. As readers and students of literature, the act of interpreting is key to understanding; but limited by outdated methodologies of assessment the opportunity to demonstrate what has been learned is practically bound to their linguistic intelligence. With the change of medium, from paper to screen, literature has undergone a kind of art and media hybridization that far from being something new and original recovers and allows the coexistence of multiple means of storytelling that extend the concept of reading, understanding and expression.
Scott Rettberg - 04.10.2013 - 11:02
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Beyond Binaries: Continuity and Change in Literary Experimentation in Response to Print and Digital Technologies.
While many critics have compared the current digital age in communications media with the print revolution that began in the 15th century, these discussions have focused primarily on the differences, as opposed to the similarities between the two moments in history (Bolter, Landow, Hayles). As an author and critic involved in exploring new approaches to digital fiction, I, too, am keenly aware of the distinct differences between the age of print and the current digital age. Nevertheless, I have also been struck by many similar concerns in the specific types of literary experimentation taking place in response to new authoring and publishing technologies today with those undertaken in the past in response to print technology. In this paper, I consider specific instances of experimentation that arose in response to print technology in works of fiction published in the eighteenth century (Richardson, Pope, Sterne) with literary experimentation in response to digital technologies (Moulthrop, Montfort/Strickland, Rodgers).
Rebecca Lundal - 04.10.2013 - 11:30
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Internet Radio and Electronic Literature: Locating the Text in the Act of Listening
This essay suggests sound(s), especially when designed/utilized to provide immersive contexts, can provide a valid literary experience and may be considered, like reading and writing, a central element in the digital narratives of electronic literature. Specifically, 1) Sound (vocal and other) provides the basis for narrative, the heart of every literary experience; 2) Rather than sound(s) in electronic literature, sound(s) might be heard as electronic literature; sound(s) might form the basis for new works of electronic literature; 3) Evolving considerations of Internet radio, especially with regard to mobile, interactive, social audio networks, with content drawn from radio drama and radio art, may provide models for these new forms of electronic literature that are deep, rich, engaging, and immersive literary experiences that locate the text not (solely?) in the acts of reading and writing, but also in the act of listening.
Scott Rettberg - 04.10.2013 - 11:32
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“Iteration, you see”: Floating Text and Chaotic Reading/Viewing in slippingglimpse.
Crossing the tools of fluid dynamics with those of literary criticism, Gwen Le Cor casts a new light on contemporary writing in new media. Unlike first generation, “classical” hypertexts that were non-linear in the sense of using linked textual elements, Le Cor sees Strickland and Lawson Jaramillo’s poem, slippingglimpse, as a more “contemporary” instance of nonlinear writing that can be viewed (literally) as a “complex, nonlinear turbulent system.”
Arngeir Enåsen - 04.10.2013 - 11:46
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Editing Electronic Literature in the Global Publishing System
Contemporary “format disruptions” (Savikas) lead to a new experience and practice of scholarly publishing: it is global, virtual, and instantaneous. How does this apply to electronic literature? Elit works exist in a field of publication, characterized by circulation, commentary, and archiving. They are subject to complex corporate toolchains, software updates, social media, etc. The work is no longer just the work but the entirety of this field. Publication is no longer a single event or a single thing. Think of this in terms of Luhmann’s systems theory: the differentiating distinction between artistic production and critical discourse is shifted; the difference made by artwork - its “poetics” - is now systematically linked to critical discourse.
Elisabeth Nesheim - 04.10.2013 - 11:55
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On Writing & Digital Media (Performance Research 18:5)
This issue of Performance Research will enfold an understanding of digital text within the context of performance studies, ordinary language philosophy and speech act theory, integrational linguistics, the performance of self and gender, and performance writing. In other words, we will be looking at the different modes of performance as they are manifest across the whole digital apparatus (dispositif). This includes machinic performance, the performance of codes and scripting, the performativity of language itself on the screen, the semiotics of the click, interactivity between digital language and the body, and how digital texts ‘perform’ us as social beings.
(Source: Description from Performance Research website)
Scott Rettberg - 15.10.2013 - 12:58
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Electronic Literature and the New Media Art (Thematic Section of Primerjalna književnost 36.1)
Electronic Literature and the New Media Art (Thematic Section of Primerjalna književnost 36.1)
Scott Rettberg - 16.10.2013 - 00:49
