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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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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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Ad Verbum
Ad Verbum is a Oulipo-inspired wordplay-based game.
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 12:00
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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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Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House
Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House is the story of a poor suburban family told interactively through text.
(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)
A three-chapter game (with an epilogue) in which you're a different character in each chapter. The twist is that each chapter covers roughly the same space of time, and you interact with the other two characters, to varying degrees, when you're in each pair of shoes. The gameplay is a bit restrictive--the game doesn't allow for a lot of variation--but the characters themselves are well developed and the interactions feel reasonably realistic. The game even does a passable job of recording the actions you take when you're one character and playing them back when you're a different character, observing the antics of the first. Very short--20-30 minutes to play through at most--but worth playing; it largely eschews puzzles in favor of character interaction in a way that little IF attempts.
(Source: Review by Duncan Stevens, BAF's guide to the IF Archive)
Scott Rettberg - 17.01.2013 - 13:26
