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Basquiat meets Mario Brothers? Digital poet Jason Nelson on the meaning of art games
An interview with the self-described digital poet Jason Nelson on the semiotic pleasures of playing and creating "art-games," indie works produced outside corporate game studios, which, Nelson predicts, will eventually be recognized as the most significant art movement of the 21st century. While explaining how he came to be a digital author, Nelson addresses topics such as his continued love of Flash as a production tool, despite its likely obsolesence, his appreciation for gamescapes that allow for aimless wandering, and the intense reactions his art-games provoke in players. Alluding to the fact that Digital Poet is not the most lucrative of professions, Nelson signals his desire to design "big budget console games," provided he could do so on his terms.
(Source: Eric Dean Rasmussen)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.09.2011 - 12:44
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Ergodic Characters
While much of the attention towards ergodic fiction has been focusing on plot (either dynamic or multiple-path), its characters still lack complexity and expressiveness. In this paper we will explore two different techniques to face this problem.
One major issue in videogames is the lack of personality in user-controlled characters. In other words, the author of a videogame cannot give a deep personality to her character, because the user will be the one who will control it. For example, you cannot design a melancholic, non-violent character, if there is a knife available in the environment. Many users would just take the knife and start a Doom-like game, turning the originally pacifist character into a serial killer. The designer can obviously prevent the user from manipulating harmful objects. However, through this arbitrary rule, users will see their freedom limited. This would also diminish the environment's coherence: why some objects can be manipulated and other cannot?
Scott Rettberg - 19.01.2013 - 13:24
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Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World's Longest Interactive Fiction
Blue Lacuna is an ambitious new long form interactive fiction comprising nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code. The longest work yet produced in the Inform 7 language, it is also among the most substantial text-based story games in existence, an interactive novel with an average play time of fifteen to twenty hours. In development between 2006 and 2009, Blue Lacuna features several experiments of interest to creators of long-form interactive stories. This paper describes these experiments and performs an anecdotal post-mortem on what succeeded and failed in the project's realization. I focus on how successful I was at achieving my three principal goals: 1) simplifying the IF interface so those unfamiliar with the medium can easily participate, 2) telling a story which revolves around the player's ability to make choices with real dramatic repercussions, and 3) creating a character able to form a complex relationship with the player across the span of a novel-length story.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 11:24
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Game-Based Digitally Mediated Narrative Construction
There are various ways of constructing a short story or a novel ranging from detailed planning of characters, back story, and plot before beginning to write to fluid writing. Somewhere in the middle, but near fluid writing, is the approach taken by the late television writer Sydney Sheldon who visualized the flow of the story and narrated what he saw and heard to a secretary. The paper surveys practices in narrative construction both current and speculative, such as a possible future use of advanced functional brain imaging, but emphasizes a particular game-based approach currently being attempted in a pilot project. At the Virtual Environments Lab researchers are developing a system that generates a text based on game play. The game has two purposes: entertainment for the player and generation of a work of fiction that describes the experiences of the player. Many of the characters and situations come from Through the Looking Glass. The player character, as Alice, explores an 8x8 grid and interacts with non player characters. The NPCs ask questions, and the PC gives free response answers. The PC can also ask the NPCs questions.
Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:09
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Písanie v interaktívnych médiách. Digitálna fikcia /Writing in the Interactive Media. Digital Fiction
The subject of the thesis is to introduce and contextualise the possibilities of writing in the interactive media as well as to study the literary art of interactive media in the Anglophone area. One of the attributes of the contemporary art pieces of interactive media is their intermedial character; the authors often link text, image and sound to introduce the fictional world. The aim of the thesis is on one hand to refer to the questions that are not new but have appeared in new circumstances due to the digital format and internet and on the other hand to refer to the questions typical for the digital fiction research. The research concentrates on the digital fiction – a digital piece written in a computer programme, in which the author offers a fictional world. The thesis addresses several aspects of digital fiction, whose combination indicates its characteristic status within the group of digital art – fragmentarity of narrative, multilinearity, interactivity, performativity, dynamics, intermediality and the principles of game and play.
Zuzana Husarova - 28.06.2013 - 14:46
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maintenant #40: sergej timofejev
I want to share simple truths with you” – an interview with Sergej Timofejev by SJ Fowler.
One of the most adventurous and groundbreaking poets in the Baltic, Latvia’s Sergej Timofejev is a fundamental part of the radical reconfiguration of his nation’s poetic culture and landscape in the last few decades. A urbane, grounded, naturalistic stylist, the power of his poetry has allowed him to implement numerous innovations in a region associated with formalism. Experiments with poetry and music / art installations / performance / video & even computer games, have seen his popularity soar in Latvia, though he remains a poet writing in Russian. In the 40th edition of Maintenant, Sergej Timofejev discusses the influence of Western culture, the healthy state of Latvian poetry and the reward of poetic collaborative innovation.
Natalia Fedorova - 04.09.2013 - 21:38
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North Meets South: Jorge Luis Borges's "The Interloper" and Natalie Bookchin's Media Experiment "The Intruder"
Discusses digital adaptations of Borges in general and then gives a close reading of Bookchin's The Intruder.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 01.10.2015 - 11:29
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Jokes, Prompts and Models: Engaging Player Collaboration in Netprov
How can we best invite everyday writers to collaborate and play in electronic literature projects? For the past few years I have being doing projects in a format I call netprov. Netprov (networked improv narrative) organizes the creation of collaborative stories in real time using multiple available digital media. Working with Mark C. Marino and others we have developed a set of working guidelines and suggestions about how to best engage players’ imaginations and extend invitations that will encourage their creativity. I will discuss our methods, our “Rules of the Game” for several netprovs, and describe the degrees of player participation, from Featured Players who adopt ongoing characters to Casual Players who may only contribute a line or an image.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Hannah Ackermans - 11.11.2015 - 16:35
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Cyberdrama
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce Cyberdrama, the first section of First Person.
Andre Lund - 26.09.2017 - 13:23
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Interview with Christine Wilks
Christine Wilks is an awarded digital writer, artist and developer of playable stories who participated in different projects in the field of electronic literature. In this interview, she talks about her interest in electronic literature, her activism in the different projects as well as the use of different media tools and of ludic elements in her works.
Daniele Giampà - 07.04.2018 - 17:12
