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AlletSator
“Alletsator” is a hypermedia work that is best defined as a quantum opera, or perhaps in the final analysis a game – interactive, three-dimensional – where the present and the virtual intersect and mix. A hybrid hypermedia, therefore, in which the “spectactor” (immersed in an environment that is intended to be cosmic, magical, fantastic, dreamlike ...) is challenged to traverse the surface of a sequence of drawings. The work is a journey without ending. “Alletsator” is a computer generated narrative that allows an infinite potential of combinations. It is also an object of the new media art. It is a product and agent of the cyber culture that promises to revolutionize the world as we know it. The dramaturgy it needs is already anticipated in the metaphor that better explains the work itself: a spacecraft of dispersed paths, of multilinear unexpected pathways.
Scott Rettberg - 30.01.2011 - 18:22
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Colossal Cave Adventure
The first work of interactive fiction was Colossal Cave Adventure. Its first iteration was developed in 1975-76 by Will Crowther, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based programmer who was part of the team that developed ARPANET, the original network infrastructure on which the Internet is based (Montfort, 1997, p. 86), and subsequently expanded by Don Woods (1977). Crowther turned his programming skills towards a game about cave exploration after his divorce in order to entertain his children when they visited him (Nelson, 2001, p. 343). Crowther had been a spelunker in his past, helping to map a network of caverns in Kentucky (Jerz, 2007). He used that experience as the basis for the network of caves described in Adventure. The game itself provided a relatively simple experience of navigation and puzzle solving. Players attempted to retrieve objects from within the cave environments, and to win by completing their collection—a kind of textual geocaching.
Jill Walker Rettberg - 18.02.2011 - 15:06
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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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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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Book and Volume
An interactive fiction written in Inform and running on the Z-Machine, Book and Volumes simulates an eventful day in a near-present factory town. The interactor is not offered adventure, monsters to defeat, or treasures to find, but a chance to perform the routine tasks of an information-technology worker. As Brian Kerr wrote, "It's about a sysadmin in the weird, charming cyber-Gotham of nTopia who spends the last working day of his/her/its life rebooting servers and reacting to frantic pages from an unseen supervisor. ('Net extremely hoseled. Engine team being hideously masticated by this outage. Demo rapidly approaching. Get to the cages. Reboot the servers. Hasten. Do not rest. Please. All five of them.') What’s the game really about? Knut, a resident of nTopia, pegs it: 'Reality. Illusion. Theme is reality versus illusion. Must discern reality. And illusion.
(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 08.03.2011 - 14:45
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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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Screen
Screen is an alternative literary game created in the "Cave," a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins with reading and listening. Texts, presenting moments of memory as a virtual experience, appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that does not settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster; struck words don't always return to where they came from; and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. (Source: authors' description.)
Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:56
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This is how you will die
A recombinatory digital fiction/poem for predicting death. It uses the stripped down the code of an online slot machine game, replacing the cards with 15 five-line death fictions/poeticals. The artwork recombines the scenarios randomly every time you spin. The writing divides the scenarios into location, method, result and post-result of each death possibility. Additionally, you can win death videos/poetry visuals and free spins. Some are rather scared of this creature's forecasting tone, while others exalt in the absurdist joy of the way all stories are interchangeable, interrelated and happily random.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Scott Rettberg - 20.04.2011 - 13:23
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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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This Is Not A Poem
This work takes the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and, transcribing it onto a "scratchable" disk, makes it into a toy, a game, and a language engine.
(Source: Author's description)
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 12:35
