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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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All Roads
Venice. The tight winding alleys and long dirty canals. Easy to become lost here, where every street emerges somewhere unexpected. In the central square a scaffold has been erected for your neck, and if only you can escape for long enough you might survive, but in this city all roads lead back to Piazza San Marco and the Hanging Clock.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 12:53
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Bad Machine
Bad Machine is codework that works. It presents a surface of text that blends English with structures and tropes from programming languages, database queries and reports, error messages, and other forms of machine communication. But it is also a functioning interactive fiction, capable of accepting commands and being figured out by the assiduous reader. The machinery of program and language is at work here, as those who are up to the challenge of Bad Machine can discover. (Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1).
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 18.04.2011 - 12:59
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Savoir-Faire
One of the strengths of interactive fiction is that it is able to simulate a rich world, even one that has unusual physical and magical laws. In Savoir-Faire, the (usually cliché) elements of a treasure-hunt and a world suffused by magic are situated, unusually, in 18th-century France; a young man has come back to his childhood home to ask for a loan and has found it oddly abandoned. The special workings of Savoir-Faire's world open memories and unlock relationships between things, adding resonance to this intricate, difficult play of puzzles.
(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1).
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 15:13
