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1. New Word Order: Basra

   New Word Order: Basra [NWO] is a mod for the game Half-Life, consisting of a playable map and custom textures. Gaming is the largest demographic of new media usage, and Half-Life stands out for its combination of first-person shooter action and compelling story. It remains the most popular online multiplayer game. Every object in Half-Life is either shootable or background. What if the objects are words? How does language play into your interactions in the violent world of the game? The text in NWO is composed of phrases from "Introduction to Poetry," a short poem from former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins. The thematic violence in Collins' poem resonated through the creation of NWO in early 2003, during the second invasion of Iraq. When you enter the map you see words hanging in the air. You can jump and climb on them, you can run along the tops, you can keep playing and wandering in the space. You soon attack the words. You use the broken words as a reduced and processed writing. Break the words, destroy the letters. NWO, along with every game and every image, is about the re-circulation of bodies and interpretive agendas.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.02.2011 - 10:13

2. Book and Volume

   An interactive fiction written in Inform and running on the Z-Machine, Book and Volumes simulates an eventful day in a near-present factory town. The interactor is not offered adventure, monsters to defeat, or treasures to find, but a chance to perform the routine tasks of an information-technology worker. As Brian Kerr wrote, "It's about a sysadmin in the weird, charming cyber-Gotham of nTopia who spends the last working day of his/her/its life rebooting servers and reacting to frantic pages from an unseen supervisor. ('Net extremely hoseled. Engine team being hideously masticated by this outage. Demo rapidly approaching. Get to the cages. Reboot the servers. Hasten. Do not rest. Please. All five of them.') What’s the game really about? Knut, a resident of nTopia, pegs it: 'Reality. Illusion. Theme is reality versus illusion. Must discern reality. And illusion.

   (Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2)

    

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 14:45

3. Stud Poetry

   Author description: Stud Poetry is a poker game played with words instead of cards. Your goal is to build as strong a poetry hand as you can and, of course, to win as much money as you can. Stud Poetry is a game of courage and faith, and a bit of luck too. To become a great master of Stud Poetry, you need to believe in the power of words, their magic capability to move mountains, minds, and souls. Surely it won't be easy, but when you finally have won all the money with your wonderful five-word poetry hands, you'll know it's worth it.

   (Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1).

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 22.03.2011 - 09:52

4. SFZero

   SF0 is an alternate-reality game in which players are encouraged to complete surreal tasks from a variety of disciplines. Generally, these tasks are designed to in some way effect the real world. An example of a task: "Refuse to allow your celebrations and habits be bound by arbitrary turns of the celestial screw. Publicly do something out of season. Document the reactions of the timebound."

   Scott Rettberg - 18.04.2012 - 00:36

5. IVANHOE

   IVANHOE is a pedagogical environment for interpreting textual and other cultural materials. It is designed to foster critical awareness of the methods and perspectives through which we understand and study humanities documents. An online collaborative playspace, IVANHOE exposes the indeterminacy of humanities texts to role-play and performative intervention by students at all levels. While we often refer to IVANHOE as a ?game,? it is important to understand that the concept has broader implications for humanities pedagogy and research, and that many modes of sophisticated, scholarly gamesmanship are possible in the IVANHOE environment. The ?rules? of the game are up to its players and initiators. IVANHOE can foster both competitive and collaborative interaction, well suited to research and teaching. No, really: what is IVANHOE? In simple terms, IVANHOE is a digital space in which players take on alternate identities in order to collaborate in expanding and making changes to a ?discourse field,? the documentary manifestation of a set of ideas that people want to investigate collaboratively.

   Hannah Ackermans - 31.03.2016 - 15:15

6. Dwarf Fortress

   Dwarf Fortress is a complex, text-based computer game that has been in development by Tarn and Zach Adams since 2002. The game begins by first procedurally generating an expansive, dynamic world in which players attempt to guide an exponentially increasing colony of temperamental dwarves to build and manage within an ever expanding fortress. The task is made difficult by both the unpredictable and emergent behaviors of the simulation as well as by the anachronistic and arduous interface: a screen full of ASCII characters recalling the personal computers of the early 1980s. Inspired by games like Rogue (1980) and Sim City (1989), the stark textual interface contrasts with the game's complexity as Dwarf Fortress can easily consume all available processing power of a contemporary computer.

   Eirik Tveit - 06.09.2016 - 15:30

7. Loss, Undersea

   Loss, Undersea is an interactive narrative/multimedia semantics project by Fox Harrell in which a character moving through a standard workday encounters a world submerging into the depths -- a double-scope story of banal life blended with a fantastic Atlantean metaphor. As a user selects emotion-driven actions for the character to perform, the character transforms -- sea creature extensions protrude and calcify around him -- and poetic text narrating his loss of humanity and the human world undersea ensues. (Source: MIT Icelab)

   Magnus Knustad - 07.09.2016 - 12:41