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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
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Reconstructing Mayakovsky
Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies.
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:38
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Clues
Clues explores the nature of communication, knowledge, and identity through the language and postures of mystery fiction. It's a metaphysical whodunit that invites you to solve the mystery by uncovering clues linked to images throughout the work. The search becomes a game that leads you down wooded trails, back alleys, and empty hallways. Which characters should you pursue? Which objects should you investigate? To win the game, you must separate all the clues from the red herrings. Your final score determines the outcome of the text. But is the mystery really soluble? Is winning actually better than losing? Are the answers or the questions more revealing?
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
Scott Rettberg - 16.06.2012 - 11:45
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From Beyond
The installation plays with the boundaries of form and consciousness through play with the material and the immaterial. From Beyond invites the reader to interact with a digitally augmented Ouija Board. The Ouija Board (also known as the “talking board”) is well-explored in popular culture as a device that is traditionally employed in an attempt to communicate with the dead, who are themselves voiceless and thus can be “heard” only through the indication of written letters. The board is thus itself an interface that plays at the boundaries of the real and the presumed supernatural, as it operates through superstition: readers place their fingers on the planchette and it moves to answer questions, with a “Yes” or “No” placed on the board. Likewise, our digitally enhanced Ouija Board invites the user to guide a planchette (a pointer) as a tactile interface for making binary decisions while traversing a hypertextual work on a screen that serves as a lens between the reader’s world and the world of the story.
Hannah Ackermans - 08.09.2015 - 09:45
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Digital: A Love Story
A computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988. I can guarantee at least ONE of the following is a real feature: discover a vast conspiracy lurking on the internet, save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow, get away with telephone fraud, or hack the Gibson! Which one? You'll just have to dial in and see. Welcome to the 20th Century.
(Source: Authors's statement, ELC3)
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Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story is a visual novel set “five-minutes into the future of 1988” and invites the player back into the early days of the Internet through the interface of an Amiga-esque computer. The graphical interface of white text on a blue background accompanies the metaphor of the local BBS (bulletin board system) as a happening space for conspiracy and flirting. All the core interaction takes place through dialing into this system, which has multiple characters and threads that can be explored through sending out replies to advance the story. The work is strongly grounded in early hacker culture and William Gibsen-inspired models of artificial intelligence.
Scott Rettberg - 01.09.2016 - 15:36
