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Inanimate Alice, Episode 4: Hometown
Author description: Episode 4 of Inanimate Alice finds Alice going to school at last. She and her parents have ended up in a multicultural city in the middle of England. For the first time ever, Alice has friends her own age, and they do all the things that 14 year olds everywhere do. "And now I am going to die!" Attempting to impress her friends one afternoon, Alice climbs a rickety staircase outside an abandoned factory. When it collapses beneath her, she hangs on by her fingernails, then hauls herself up onto a ledge. But now she is stuck - she can't get down, she can't go up. The only way out is through the scary factory, half-demolished and very dangerous. Can you help Alice? Can you find the way out? Catch up with her in Inanimate Alice, Episode 4: Hometown. Episode 4 is the largest and most complex episode in the series to date. The "teachers only" version of this episode provides a 'skip intro' option and opens up all of the navigation icons from the beginning so that educators can focus on the sections of the narrative appropriate to their needs.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 21.02.2011 - 10:01
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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
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Digital Genres: Digital Art, Electronic Literature, and Computer Games (DIKULT 103, Spring 2011)
Digital Genres: Digital Art, Electronic Literature, and Computer Games (DIKULT 103, Spring 2011)
Scott Rettberg - 22.02.2011 - 12:24
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Basho's Frogger and JABBER
Matsuo Basho, the inventor of Haiku, penned the following poem (translation R. H. Blyth): "The old pond / A frog jumps in / The sound of water." A few hundred years later, the concrete poet dom silvester houédard offered his rendition: "pond / frog / plop." Fifty years after that, a Zen video game appearerd celebrating one of the most famous haiku. Basho's Frogger was produced as a response to derek beaulieu and Gary Barwin's Frogments from the Frag Pool, a book of Basho translations. JABBER produces nonsense words that sound like English words, in the way that the portmanteau words from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" sound like English words. When a letter comes into contact with another letter or group of letters, a calculation occurs to determine whether they bond according to the likelihood that they would appear contiguously in the English lexicon. Clusters of letters accumulate to form words, which results in a dynamic nonsense word sound poem floating around on the screen with each iteration of the generator. JABBER realises a linguistic chemistry with letters as atoms and words as molecules.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 23.02.2011 - 08:07
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The Doll Games
The Doll Games is a hypertext project that documents a complex narrative game that Shelley and Pamela Jackson used to play when they were prepubescent girls, and frames that documentation in faux-academic discourse. In “sitting uneasily between” different styles of discourse, the work enlists the reader to differentiate between authoritative knowledge and play. Although the dolls in question are “things of childhood,” the project reveals that in the games the authors used to play with these dolls, one can find the roots of both Pamela and Shelley’s “grownup” lives: Shelley’s vocation as a fiction writer, and Pamela’s as a Berkeley-trained Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Throughout, the project plays with constructions of gender and of identity. This is a “true” story that places truth of all kinds in between those ironic question marks. The Doll Games is a network novel in the sense that it uses the network to construct narratives in a particularly novel way. The Doll Games is also consciously structured as a network document, and plays in an ironic fashion with its network context.
Scott Rettberg - 26.02.2011 - 16:24
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Mindwheel
Mindwheel
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 07.03.2011 - 13:02
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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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Chroma
Chroma is an interactive serial that examines issues of racial identity in virtual environments through a tightly choreographed combination of graphics, voice and music. Three digital explorers are tasked by their mentor with the creation of avatars that will enable exploration of a newly rediscovered "natural cyberspace" humans long ago lost the ability to access. Conflict arises when one character pauses to question the wisdom of blindly forging ahead with human representation in the digital world. Interactive real-time animations are used to represent the thoughts and feelings of the main characters, and respond to the user in intimate ways that help to illuminate the unfolding story while building emotional connections with its central players.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 13:45
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Façade
Façade
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 14:15
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Game, game, game, and again game
Game, game, game and again game is a digital poem, retro-game, an anti-design statement and a personal exploration of the artist's changing worldview lens. Much of the western world's cultural surroundings, belief systems, and design-scapes, create the built illusion of clean lines and definitive choice, cold narrow pathways of five colors, three body sizes and encapsulated philosophy. Within net/new media art the techno-filter extends these straight lines into exacting geometries and smooth bit rates, the personal as WYSIWYG buttons. This game/artwork, while forever attached to these belief/design systems, attempts to re-introduce the hand-drawn, the messy and illogical, the human and personal creation into the digital, via a retro-game style interface, Hovering above and attached to the poorly drawn aesthetic is a personal examination of how we/I continually switch and un-switch our dominate belief systems. Moving from levels themed for faith or real estate, for chemistry or capitalism, the user triggers corrected poetry, jittering creatures and death and deathless noises.
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 14:43
