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1. 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

2. Accounts of the Glass Sky

   In this Flash hypertext, Coverley weaves a tapestry of text, image, and sound, telling a California story that many readers can relate to. In this piece, the sky itself is the center of a meditation on memory and loss across decades of human experience. The same "blue sky" that often refers to people's wildest dreams now comes to represent boundaries and fears.

   (Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1.)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 11:07

3. Storyland

   Storyland (version 2) is a randomly created narrative which plays with social stereotypes and elements of popular culture. Each sentence is constructed from a pool of possibilities, allowing each reader a unique story. The reader presses the "new story" button, and a story is created for that moment in time. It is unlikely that any two stories will be identical. Storyland exposes its narrative formula thus mirroring aspects of contemporary cultural production: sampling, appropriation, hybrids, stock content, design templates. It risks discontinuity and the ridiculous while providing opportunities for contemplation beyond the entertainment factor.

   The computer-generated combinatorial story is one of the oldest forms of digital writing. Storyland, with its simple circus frame, plays with this tradition by performing recombination of the sort seen in cut-up and in Oulipian work. The system repeatedly plots amusingly repetitive stories, inviting the reader to consider, to read its scheme for composition.

   (Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. One).

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 14:57

4. 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