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Examining the Role of Micronarrative in Commercial Videogames, Art Games and Interactive Narrative
Integrating story with games in a flexible way that gives interactors meaningful choices within a narrative experience has long been a goal of both game developers and digital storytellers. The "micronarrative" is an unexplored avenue of narrative structure that can be a useful tool in analysis and design of such experiences. A micronarrative is a smaller moment of plot coherence and miniature arc that is nested within a larger narrative structure. The concept was first labeled by Jenkins in 2004 in the context of a game's "meaningful moments" and expanded upon in Bizzocchi's 2007 analytical framework for videogame storytelling. It has its roots in earlier examinations of arc and scale, such as Propp's concept of "Functions" or McKee's "Beats" in literature, as well as in Barthes’ classification of a “hierarchy of levels or strata” which incorporates “micro-sequences” as described in his structural analysis of narrative (1975).
Daniela Ørvik - 17.02.2015 - 15:57
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The Riderly Text: The Joy of Networked Improv Literatur
This essay aims to discuss literary pleasure, new media literacy, and
the Networked Improv Literature (Netprov). In particular, the author
will discuss the challenges of “close-reading” the Speidishow, a
Netprov enacted via Twitter (and a constellation of supplementary
web-based media) over a period of several weeks. In the process of
trying to understand the dynamics of reading on Twitter, the author of
this essay created a Twitter account, @BrutusCorbin, and consulted
with the writers about the plot structure. Through active engagement
with the fictional world, Corbin quickly became embroiled in a
sub-plot. Seeking distance from the active plots which Corbin was
involved in, his author created two new characters, @FelixMPastor and
@FrannyCheshire, to explore different aspects of the fictional world.
Pastor and Cheshire were subsequently dragged into the story, as well.
This piece will dig into the concept of the “readerly” and “writerly”
text as identified by Roland Barthes in S/Z and The Pleasure of the
Text and settle on a third term: “the riderly text.”Sumeya Hassan - 17.02.2015 - 15:59
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Posthumanism and Electronic Literature
Posthumanism, according to Cary Wolfe, "names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore" (xv-xvi). This conference paper brings the framework of posthumanist philosophy to bear on the field of electronic literature, at a critical moment in time wherein our conception of the human, and of literature, are fundamentally questioned through digital technology. I argue that humanist philosophy is explicitly tied to the rise of print literature, via Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), while posthumanism is linked with digital media (Wolfe 2010) and, by extension, electronic literature. Furthermore, posthumanism interrogates assumptions of autonomy and subjectivity inherited from humanism, and via cybernetics articulates an image of the human as another information-processing machine. Electronic literature's reliance and amalgamation of natural and artificial languages (most noticeable in “codework”) reflects the posthumanist critique of the supposed binaries between human and machine.
Thor Baukhol Madsen - 17.02.2015 - 16:02
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Intergrams in My Pocket
Digital literature authors — particularly those of an experimental bent — are frequently obliged to use multimedia environments whose longevity is questionable at best. When support for such an environment on a new platform is not available, portation of the work may be the most direct strategy for making the work available. An excellent example of such a platform was Hypercard — only available on Macintosh MacOS Classic (and emulators). This paper discusses my experiences in porting Intergrams from Hypercard — first to Windows in 1996, and more recently to Squeak, where it will run on a wide range of platforms. Following on the pioneering recommendations of “Acid Free Bits”, the paper explores the following issues: (1) ability and desirability of digital literature authors to create their own file formats that are open, human-readable, and serve as “texts of description” (in the spirit of Bootz) whose preservation is assured by the simplicity and openness of the file format (as opposed to closed proprietary undocumented file formats often found with multimedia environments). (2) The importance and desirability of using multimedia environments which allow for self description.
Eivind Farestveit - 19.02.2015 - 14:47
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Projected Poetry: From the Medium Specific to the Complex Surface
I would like to propose a paper that centers on the specific poetic form of the mesostic. The mesostic not only allows us to reflect on the specific qualities of and differences between print, analog film, and digital born works, but also inspires thinking about complex surfaces picked up by John Cayley and Wardrip-Fruin, among others. My intervention would thus at once make a case for an “old” form of digital literature (the projected poem) and continue emerging debates on the future of textual practices that rely on contemporary developments in computer technology.
FLUXUS related artists such as John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Dick Higgins saw in the printed mesostic a way of organizing language that dispenses with grammar and syntax, which rely on linear structuring principles. The printed mesostic, by contrast, is basically organized around a phrase printed vertically on the page, whereby each letter intersects the middle of horizontally distributed lines, although additional, seemingly random rules complicate and enhance its poetic possibilities. I shall analyze more (as well as less) convincing works in this genre.
Elias Mikkelsen - 19.02.2015 - 14:56
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Echo Chambers: The Colossal Cave within House of Leaves
Inspired by Mark Z. Danielewki’s z House of Leaves (2000) and Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure (1975), It is Pitch Black renders a mysterious, non-visual environment in the form of a text-based videogame. Although Danielewski’s novel participates in the lusory logic of digital games, functions as a paradigmatic post-digital text, and includes a diverse range of media, the book contains no mention of videogames within its pages. It is Pitch Black imagines a missing appendix or additional chapter (like the four pages of hexadecimal code only included in the original hardcover publication) which takes the form of a text-based adventure game that the Navidson children may have played throughout their ordeal. Inspired by Crowther’s inaugural adventure game yet operating according to the idiom of a 3D navigable space, It is Pitch Black foregrounds the tension between the human experience of play and the microtemporal processes of a computer.
Daniela Ørvik - 19.02.2015 - 15:11
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Unraveling Twine: Open Platforms and the Future of Hypertextual Literature
As the technical affordances that shaped early electronic literature’s frontiers have become commonplace, hypertextual structures abound in our experiences of online texts. Many tools make it easier than ever to generate these types of works, but one of the most interesting for its demonstrated literary potential is Twine: a platform for building choice-driven stories easily publishable on the web without relying heavily on code. In software studies, a platform is defined by Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort as a hardware or software system that provides the “foundation of computational expression.” This definition can encompass any of the tools we use to develop procedural content, as Bogost noted on his blog: “a platform…is something that supports programming and programs, the creation and execution of computational media.” Examining Twine as a case-study among current open, non-coder friendly platforms probes the future of interactive narrative on the web—a future that, outside the traditional scope of the electronic literature community, is highly determined by the affordances of platforms and the desires of their user-developers.
Thor Baukhol Madsen - 19.02.2015 - 15:42
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Fourteen recipes for a sonnet
This paper discusses a semester-long classroom project in which senior seminar students were required to take Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14 and convert it into various media objects and texts. The assignments made use of Ian Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric” (“a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation”), assigning tasks based on the core concepts of “encoding” and “algorithm.” Some objects were electronic (music, twitter feeds) while the majority were physical objects, but they all made use of a procedural rhetoric sketched out by the original shape of the sonnet itself and the long tradition of scanning poems. In doing so, the objects produced force us to ask: where, exactly, do we “hold the light”? Is it e-lit if there’s no “e”?
(Source: Author's Abstract)
Sumeya Hassan - 26.02.2015 - 21:01
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Teaching Creative Writing with Python
The course concerns the classic tension in poetry between decontextualization and juxtaposition: deciding what a text’s constituent elements are, breaking the text into those elements, and then bringing them back together in surprising and interesting ways. Students are taught not just about string processing and text analysis, but also about the poetic possibilities of using those techniques to algorithmically build new texts. Each semester, the course culminates in a live performance, in which each student must read aloud for an audience a text that one of their programs has generated.
(Source: Author's Abstract)
Sumeya Hassan - 26.02.2015 - 21:16
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Do You Feel Like A Hero Yet? Externalised Morality in Video Games
Video games have a long tradition of including elements of moral decision making within their ludic and narrative structures. While the success of these endeavours has been mixed, the systems used to express moral choices within a game have grown more popular. However, these morality systems are inherently restricted and limited by ludic and business considerations. Coupled to this is the concept of the “magic circle” in which games are considered to be morally discontinuous spaces where the normal rules of what actions are and are not permitted are different. Moral choices then become flattened down into mere narrative flavouring rather than a reflection of an individual’s ethical makeup. Moral choices within games are thus shallow and lack the ability to truly offer us an opportunity to reflect on the actions we have taken. Rather than offering insight, they instead cheapen and simplify nuanced topics and concepts.
Eivind Farestveit - 12.03.2015 - 15:05
