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1. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature

   Cybertext explores the aesthetics and the textual dynamics of digital literature and its many diverse genres such as hypertext fiction, computer games, computer generated poetry and prose, and collaborative Internet texts such as MUDs. However, instead of insisting on the uniqueness and newness of "electronic writing" or "interactive fiction" (phrases which mean very little) the author situates these new literary forms within the larger and much older field of "ergodic" literature, from the ancient Chinese I Ching to the literary experiments of the OuLiPo. These are open, dynamic texts where the reader must perform specific actions to generate a literary sequence, which may vary for every reading. Aarseth constructs a theoretical model that describes how these literary forms are different from each other, and demonstrates how the widely assumed divide between paper texts and electronic texts breaks down under careful analysis.

   Patricia Tomaszek - 21.09.2010 - 10:59

2. Avatars of Story

   Traces the transformation of storytelling in the digital age. Since its inception, narratology has developed primarily as an investigation of literary narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have expanded the inquiry toward oral storytelling, but narratology remains primarily concerned with language-supported stories. In Avatars of Story, Marie-Laure Ryan moves beyond literary works to examine other media, especially electronic narrative forms. By grappling with semiotic media other than language and technology other than print, she reveals how story, a form of meaning that transcends cultures and media, achieves diversity by presenting itself under multiple avatars.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 24.02.2011 - 09:00

3. Labyrinth: the Rulebook without Game

   An ergodic Flash text exploring video game culture through the lens of playable manuals.

   How does one read this clever piece, which touches on so many genres, such as poetry, fiction, game, theory, game manual, and codework? It claims to be a manual for an absent game, a bottomless pit, and a labyrinth for readers to get lost, wondering if indeed the game has already begun. The reader inhabits a character from the outset, a 35 year old married man, who can take on different roles in games belonging to popular RPG and videogame genres: science fiction, spy thriller, fantasy, and labyrinth exploration. Most of the writing is in the tradition of game manual for these types of games (here’s an old favorite) which at their best help immerse the readers into the world of the game and can be more fun than the game itself. In the case of tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons & Dragons, the game is the rulebooks, and all it requires is players and some dice for the necessary randomizations— making them good recipients of the label “cardboard computers,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has used for tabletop wargames.

   Mark Marino - 28.03.2011 - 16:12

4. The History of Hypertext Authoring and Beyond: Interview with Stuart Moulthrop

   Malloy's interview with Moulthrop focuses on his early work, his entrée into writing hypertext and his hypertext novel Victory Garden, the "mostly mythical" artists' collective TINAC, and one of his later works, Under Language. The interview appears on the Authoring Software project.

   Scott Rettberg - 20.10.2011 - 09:42

5. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic literature

   The influential book that introduced the terms cybertext and ergodic literature was first written as a PhD dissertation. See the entry for the book for details and references.

   Jill Walker Rettberg - 29.06.2013 - 21:35

6. Interactive Digital Narrative

   The book is concerned with narrative in digital media that changes according to user input—Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN). It provides a broad overview of current issues and future directions in this multi-disciplinary field that includes humanities-based and computational perspectives. It assembles the voices of leading researchers and practitioners like Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, Scott Rettberg and Martin Rieser. In three sections, it covers history, theoretical perspectives and varieties of practice including narrative game design, with a special focus on changes in the power relationship between audience and author enabled by interactivity. After discussing the historical development of diverse forms, the book presents theoretical standpoints including a semiotic perspective, a proposal for a specific theoretical framework and an inquiry into the role of artificial intelligence. Finally, it analyses varieties of current practice from digital poetry to location-based applications, artistic experiments and expanded remakes of older narrative game titles.

   Scott Rettberg - 26.04.2015 - 12:19

7. The Many Ends of Network Fictions: Gamebooks, Hypertexts, Visual Novels, Games and Beyond

   This paper presents a digital humanities structural approach to branching stories across several media forms and genres over the past six decades – with special attention to patterns of endings in different narrative networks, as well as meta-patterns that mark the beginnings and endings of genres of branching literature.

   Hannah Ackermans - 14.11.2015 - 15:58

8. Ephemeral Words, Ephemeral People: Suicide and Choice in Twine Games

   On April 10th, 2014, game designer Porpentine released a game called Everything you swallow will one day come up like a stone with the intention of deleting it at the end of the day: “This game will be available for 24 hours and then I am deleting it forever. You can download it here until then. What you do with it, whether you distribute, share, or cover it, is up to you.” The game has lived on through what Porpentine predicted as “social means,” but it was designed as an ephemeral text, and one which the author deliberately destroyed as part of the act of creation. This idea of a vanishing text is interwoven with the experience of electronic literature, as Marjorie C. Luesebrink notes, as part of a practice of “text erasure” as embracing “self-undermining, undecidability, disdain for commercialization, ambivalence about technology, struggle against the presence of text itself, and response to overwhelming data” but also “the fragility of memory” (2014).

   Hannah Ackermans - 27.11.2015 - 14:52